Chris Atkinson, Tim Schmoyer, and Ronnie Bincer shared their YouTube wish lists a couple of days ago. As Chris said in Part 1, “Whether you are a viewer and/or uploader, there are many things you probably have fantasized about YouTube making better and giving everyone choices that tailor their experience for maximum enjoyment.” As he added in Part 2, “All of these would make running a YouTube channel better.”

Today, I’d like to share my wish list, which addresses the fantasies of advertisers, especially the agencies that specialize in helping small and medium-sized businesses advertise online. This includes search engine marketing agencies, web development firms, and online marketing companies. The important thing is that these businesses help SMBs with their online marketing.

These Are the Things We Want, YouTube (Part 3)

Even if you’re a YouTube Partner, you’ll also want YouTube to address the wish list for advertisers. Created in 2007, the YouTube Partner Program now has one of more than a million creators from over 30 countries around the world earning money from their YouTube videos. That’s a lot of mouths to feed.

Fortunately, more than a million advertisers are now using Google ad platforms, the majority of which are small businesses. Unfortunately, many of these advertisers still haven’t started using Google AdWords for video ads, which all belong to the YouTube TrueView family. So, Google and YouTube need to help a whole lot more advertisers to make their first video and promote it on YouTube before a whole lot more partners can start making six-figure incomes.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Roll Out the Data

Dawn C. Chmielewski of LATimes.com said, “YouTube announced it had reached the milestone in a preview of the presentation it plans to make to advertisers May 1 in New York City, during the digital upfront. It hit 800 million monthly viewers in October 2011.”

She also quoted Robert Kyncl, the global head of content partnerships for Google Inc. and YouTube, who said the rate of video consumption is growing even faster than the number of new viewers the site is attracting. YouTube now streams about 4 billion hours of video a month, up 50% over the last 12 months. “When you look at the growth in terms of users, that didn’t grow by 50%,” Kyncl told Chmielewski. “So you can see engagement per user is growing quite rapidly.”

Well, the NewFronts will attract hundreds of marketing and ad agency executives to the publishers’ presentations. But, there are over a million advertisers who won’t be attending the NewsFronts and you don’t want them to stumble over outdated data.

So, at the top of the wish list for advertisers and/or partners is: Roll out the data.

Oh, and while they are at it, the YouTube team will probably want to update some of the other viewership data. For example, the Statistics page currently says, “In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth.” I presume that the data for 2012 is already available.

According to Wikipedia, a neologism is “a newly coined term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language.” Apparently, Nielsen coined Gen C to define a group that is “not just defined by their age group, but by their connected behavior.”

Get it? Got it? Good.

At one point, Johnson uses research on the Millennial generation conducted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to support the influence of Gen C on “$500B of spending a year in the U.S.” At another point, he refers to research that says, “80% of Gen C is made up of millennials, YouTube’s core (though by no means only) audience.”

And back on May 1, 2012, Google and YouTube rolled out some research conducted by Nielsen that looked at Generation V, a psychographic profile of the on-demand video consumer that cuts across demographic groups. (Men 18-34 have strong Gen V tendencies and so do Women 24-49.)

So, is Gen C just a new name for Gen V or is it a different demographic or psychographic profile?

Hey, I pay close attention to this stuff and even I’m confused. How do you think over a million advertisers who want to know why YouTube ads are a better way to advertise feel?

So, the next item on the wish list for advertisers and/or partners is: Avoid neologisms.

Nifty infographics about Gen C like the one below are fun to embed. But they may not persuade a whole lot more advertisers to make their first video and promote it on YouTube.

Give Us the Tools, and We Will Finish the Job

Google Trends enables you to take popular search queries and explore traffic patterns over time and geography. Now YouTube search data going back to 2008 has been added, making it a great tool to look at video trends. Just visit Google Trends and enter any search you'd like and then, on the left, choose “limit to” for YouTube. You can slice by region or category as well.

For example, if you want to know whether YouTube search interest in the Harlem Shake has peaked over the last 90 days...it has.

Finally, if Equals Three needed to know if it’s better to use the term RayWilliamJohnson, Ray William Johnson, or RayWJ, it could find out that YouTube search interest in Ray William Johnson is almost 4 times more popular than RayWilliamJohnson and RayWJ doesn’t fog a mirror.

Cool.

So, the next item on the wish list for advertisers and/or partners is: Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.

According to comScore Video Metrix, Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in February 2013 with 150.7 million unique viewers. Google Sites also ranked as the top online video ad property that month with a record-breaking 2.2 billion ads.

Who at Google wouldn’t want to mention these stats at SES New York?

Four Announcements on the Same Day

Now, you may have noticed that all four announcements mentioned above were made on Wednesday, March 20, 2013. So, it would be awesome if even one of these things were to become a reality soon.

And nagging the Google and YouTube guys and gals about tackling the wish list for advertisers reminds me of the scene in the 1987 movie, The Princess Bride, where Fezzik says, “Don't pester him. He’s had a hard day."

About the Author - Greg Jarboe

Greg Jarboe is president and co-founder of SEO-PR, a content marketing agency which provides search engine optimization, online public relations, social media marketing, and video marketing services. Jarboe is author of "YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day". He is also a contributor to "Strategic Digital Marketing: Top Digital Experts Share the Formula for Tangible Returns on Your Marketing Investment" by Eric Greenberg and Alexander Kates; "Complete B2B Online Marketing" by William Leake, Lauren Vaccarello, and Maura Ginty; as well as "Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions" by Guy Kawasaki. Jarboe is profiled in "Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus" by Michael Miller. Jarboe is on the faculty of the Rutgers Center of Management Development as well as Market Motive. He is also a correspondent for Search Engine Watch as well as the Knowledge Transfer blog. He is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences. View All Posts By - Greg Jarboe

What do you think? ▼

http://twitter.com/KarlHouse Karl House

Nice piece. As a company building out, and selling a network of channels on YouTube to advertisers, we'd like to be armed with data that shows the True View product delivers more bang for your buck to brands (brand lift, purchase intent, sales etc) than regular non-skippable pre-roll.